I am really looking forward to my reading list this week. I am two books away from completing my reading goal for 2022. Which is wild!

The first book on my list is a crime thriller, set in 1949 Tel Aviv. The protagonist is a private detective and survivor of the Shoah. This one sounds like a page turner. The second book on my list is certainly timely, Tears Over Russia. This new release from Lisa Brahin explores a nearly lost piece of Jewish history as pogroms across Ukraine, from 1917 to 1920 resulted in the murder of somewhere between 100,000 to 250,000 Jews. Brahin’s grandmother was among a group who journeyed for three years in order to escape the violence.

I learned about my third selection from another member of my Torah study group. We are currently working through the very sensual

On the dusty streets of post-war Tel Aviv, a crafty killer roams free…

Israel, 1949 – Private detective Adam Lapid knows how it feels to lose everything. His whole family died in Auschwitz. He barely survived. Now he spends his nights haunted by nightmares and his days solving cases the police won’t handle.

Hired to find a missing boy, Adam thinks the case is hopeless. But he can’t turn down a mother searching for her only child.

A sweeping saga of a Jewish family and community fighting for survival against the ravages of history.

Set between events depicted in Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler’s List, Lisa Brahin’s Tears over Russia brings to life a piece of Jewish history that has never before been told.

Between 1917 and 1921, twenty years before the Holocaust began, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish pogroms across Ukraine. Lisa grew up transfixed by her grandmother Channa’s stories about her family being forced to flee their hometown of Stavishche, as armies and bandit groups raided village after village, killing Jewish residents. Channa described a perilous three-year journey through Russia and Romania, led at first by a gallant American who had snuck into Ukraine to save his immediate family and ended up leading an exodus of nearly eighty to safety.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

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